Automatic Email Address Porting for Chatmail?

Is there a way to do AEAP to move between chatmail severs? It seems like it requires (or at least, encourages) you to set up email address forwarding on your original account. You also need to know the password of the new account, is that easily accessible?

Since chatmail servers may come and go it seems like there should be a feature to make this easy, but is it even really possible right now? Is there a guide?

Most certainly AEAP is possible in Deltachat. I read somewhere that it is temporarily disabled during the major version change.

It is possible to imagine a distributed name system for e-mail contacts, or more simply, a registry governed by its users, and some keyservers seem to be developing in that direction. It may someday be possible to ask a third party where bob@example.com moved to, if anywhere.

However, AEAP just sends direct first-party notifications (an automated “Here’s my new address, please use it in future” from the old address) and forwarding.

The password of an account is available; usually either under Settings → Advanced → Password and Account or by swiping a profile right in the “Switch Profiles” view and clicking the edit icon. It depends on your client.

Does it work for accounts on Chatmail servers specifically, though? It seems like there is supposed to be a manual step of enabling email forwarding from the original account, but as far as I can see the delta chat apps don’t seem to have any mechanism to do that, and users never access their chatmail address with a normal email client.

Thank you for the note on the password. I guess with that password, I could presumably figure out the configuration needed to connect a normal IMAP email client to the chatmail account and add an email forwarding rule that way.

Found the somewhere-I-read. “Note: Changing email addresses is temporarily disabled because of ongoing changes to the DeltaChat core. It should be available again in a few months.” Some of the FAQ is a bit outdated, tho (how to contact the appstore, or how to access private keys, for instance) so “months” might be an overestimate.

I have tried using Chatmail accounts with several non-Deltachat clients, intending to write up how-tos. First you need to copy that password, and dig into the database to retrieve your keys. Receiving messages isn’t too hard, but so far I have not succeeded in sending any messages through a Chatmail server using a non-Deltachat client (there seem to be breaking differences in the format of the encrypted e-mail). This is a pity, since like SecureJoin, Chatmail compatibility would be really useful to have on other clients as well. Deltachat is standards-based, and standards become more useful as they become more widespread. WIP.

Given this, I think the assumption is that no Chatmail account needs forwarding because you’ve already notified all your contacts in your client. Your contacts in saud client are assumed to be the only people who have your public key and address.

You could, however, amalgamate your old and new accounts on one profile, I think.

The porting should still work for chatmail but you might miss some messages until all your contacts know your new address. Indeed the manual step of enabling email forwarding is not possible with chatmail to the best of my knowledge, which is why I suggested here that the app automatically clones your account and continues to check for messages at the old address when the address is ported.

However, I assume that as a workaround you could manually clone your account before porting the address to catch any messages sent to your old address, but this is just a guess. Anyone know if this would work?

Maybe I’m wrong, but the way I understand AEAP, the notification (“Here’s my new address, please use it in future”) is sent from the new address, not from the old address, and it is only sent when you manually send a message for the first time from the new address. Therefore you can’t assume that all your contacts are already notified and that forwarding isn’t necessary.

However, maybe these issues will already be solved by the time the AEAP redesign is completed? Only those people currently working on the new AEAP or familiar with the redesign can say what to expect in future.

For E2EE mail, I don’t think this would work, because your contacts do not have the public key of your new address unless you send it from your old address. You could use your old key on your new address, which would confirm that it is you, but then you’d have to send the info that you had changed from addy x to addy y in plaintext. This seems undesirable.

On the other hand, the disappearance or active opposition of you old provider should not be able to block AEAP. If it can, you no longer have a credible exit threat: you can’t leave without losing your contacts, no matter how bad the provider gets.

If your old provider relays the switchover notice, the notice must be encrypted to stop the provider blocking it. So it may make sense for AEAP to work differently with encrypted and unencrypted mail. I don’t know how it really works!

Forwarding Chatmail accounts would be useful regardless. You could use it for anonymous remailing, for instance, or to store your mails until you can read them if the server deletes them too quickly.